WEST END (WITHOUT THE BLUES) – Elizabeth Cook, left, and her mother Janet share a building for their businesses and say the arrangement benefits them both.

Jazz legend Miles Davis recorded “So What” in 1959. The song defines nonchalant, in-your-face, modern, cool.

Head down Main Street in Hyannis, to the West End, and you’ll find Sew What and ETC, where a mother and daughter run two businesses that in 2009 define nonchalant, in-your-face, modern, cool – yet warm.

You can go into Janet’s shop, Sew What, and see sewing machines, crystal chandeliers, Easter decorations, and celebrity photos from the Melody Tent. You can order a hem or a wedding dress.

Next door, you can book an appointment in daughter Liz’s clean, black and white salon for a hairdo or a facial.

Mother and daughter tell distinctly different, but equally challenging, life stories and are making their way as partners and friends. Janet, the mother, spoke of raising her only child as a single parent. Liz, the daughter, has served in the Army as a satellite technician and says she was injured during service to our country.

Now, daughter and mother are also tenant and landlord in a building in the West End. Their arrangement is helping Liz to get started in business as an esthetician, and single mom Janet to give a boost to her only child.

“I love Hyannis,” said Janet, who lives in Centerville but has run her business in the West End for 33 years. She has many ideas for the part of town where she works.

“I’d like to see a fountain,” said Janet of the West End rotary, “ and a statue – a really beautiful statue. But now, we don’t even get Christmas lights or flower pots.”

Janet Cook says that she would have liked to develop her little corner of Hyannis into a place of commercial rentals with a few studio apartments on an upper story, but says regulations did not allow her dream to flourish.

“I grew up in Hyde Park (Boston), and Hyannis attracted me because it is a city,” said Janet. She points to walls of photographs of performers at the nearby Melody Tent for whom she has worked on costumes: Willie Nelson, Harry Belafonte, Oprah Winfrey, Ben Vereen, Diana Ross, Anne Murray, Joel Grey, Liberace, Robert Goulet, and Pearl Bailey. She brought daughter Liz to the Tent at “how old was I, Mom, 2 or 3 days old?” asked Liz.

Janet said that she is a cousin of Dane Cook, a comedian and cover guy for, among many national magazines, MAD, which she displays in her shop. Pictures of Cook have drawn many young customers, said Janet, who added that she welcomes them.

She reflects on her own youth. “I had legs like Twiggy,” she said of the ‘60s celebrity model, “and so I got some [modeling] jobs. That got me sewing.”

Daughter Liz, who said in notes handed to a reporter that she strives for “an old school beauty shoppe feel” in her business, has been a correctional officer, a makeup artist for movies and commercials, and, as a fifth-grader at Hyannis West Elementary School, won a contest to design a t-shirt for Barnstable’s 350th anniversary. Half of the money from that t-shirt, Liz said, went to Independence House in Hyannis, which supports families affected by domestic violence.

Liz said many young Cape Codders are returning here to live and work “because we want to be here.” The mother and daughter continue to support “young people’s charities,” from prom gowns for girls who couldn’t otherwise afford them, to “The Emancipation Network” that works on behalf of girls who are sold into sexual slavery.

“I always had big dreams,” said Janet. “My mother bought me a radio shaped like a Rolls Royce” as an inspiration. Now, Janet Cook keeps a motto in her West End studio:

A woman who works with her hands is a laborer.

A woman who works with her hands and her head is a craftswoman.

A woman who works with her hands, head, and heart is an ARTIST. (The capitals on a handwritten index card are hers).